Monday, October 10

Insanity and stuff.

The French are renowned for their post-modern philosophical performance art, but this, even by their standards, is just brilliant:

A Frenchman born under the sign of Aries who sued a newspaper for giving him an unfavorable horoscope was told he was wasting the court's time and ordered to pay 350 euros in legal fees.

Fined? There's no justice. They should have given him the Turner Prize.

He was actually rather subtle:

The man complained about a prediction earlier this year that Arians would "rediscover the emotions of adolescence especially in the field of love, where the desire to have fun will overtake the need to build something longer-lasting."

He told the court that he was a "serious father" and risked being typecast by employers as a "skirt-chaser" and therefore unreliable.

So his complaint wasn't even that the prediction failed to come true; rather, he was concerned that it would lead people who believe horoscopes to believe that he would cheat on his family. In effect, he was trying to sue the paper for libel. The more I think about this one, the more convinced I am that this man is some kind of genius. And that he should have won his case.

The live Spuiten & Slikken show — which can be translated either as Inject & Swallow or Ejaculate & Swallow — starts on October 10 on the Dutch youth channel BNN, which last upset viewer sensibilities with a programme entitled This Is How You Screw.

"We're not setting out to shock, but to inform," said a show producer, Sjoerd van den Broek.

Yeah, I can tell from your choice of title.

(By the way, can I just say how fascinating it is that the Dutch use the same word for "ejaculate" and "inject". Wouldn't "shoot up" be a good translation?)

"The idea is to treat these subjects like a piece of theatre, to review them, if you like. There's been endless idle chat about these matters, but never an adult critique."

Main presenter Filemon Wesselink (26) is billed to go on a pub crawl, take heroin in the form of a pill, and try LSD at home on the sofa under the watchful eye of his mother. He will also retire into a locked room and try to establish whether oral sex is better from a man or a woman.

No mention of whether his mother will also be supervising the blowjobs.

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent;and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.